Spoof Ad 'Best In The World'
Swansea's spoof advert for Tango has been named the world's best soft drink ad this year. And nearly four million people worldwide have so far seen it. Heven't see it? Go here. [Link via]

"We count the puppies every 15 to 20 minutes," said pet store owner Larry Silvey. "We check the cribs, and we realized the puppy was stolen, so we went back, checked on the camera, and there he was, stealing the puppy."

A strange and rare discovery near Seaside was puzzling marine scientists Monday. A nearly six foot long King-of-the-Salmon washed up on the beach.

It’s a member of the Ribbonfish family normally found 1,600 below the surface of the ocean, from Alaska to Baja and along the coast of Chile. They can grow up to, and possibly exceed six feet. [Thanks Jason]

Here are a few weird stories from the last few days including a penis removal story. We haven't had one of those for a while!

Drunk Wins Bet, Loses Penis
A 30-year-old man who was drunk made a bet with his friend for $2,360 that he would cut off his penis, and he wasn't lying. Luckily for him Latvian doctors were willing to stitch it bak on - the first such operation in the country's history. It is not known whether his mate gave him his money.

Attacker Bites Chunk Out Of Mom
A Durban woman will have to undergo cosmetic surgery after her Margate holiday turned into a nightmare when an attacker bit a piece of flesh from her cheek. The chunk of flesh that was chomped out of her cheek was the size of a R5 coin

Woman Killed By Own Dogs
An autopsy has shown that a woman bled to death after being mauled by a pack of nine wolf dogs that she had raised as pets and was so devoted to that she once told a neighbor they "give me unqualified love."

Scissors Thrown From Highrise Lodge In Woman's Skull
An elderly Hong Kong woman was rushed to hospital after a pair of scissors thrown from a high rise window lodged into her skull. And in an unrelated incident a 28-year-old man was also injured by falling scissors. Click to view an un-gruesome pic of the woman.

Woman Drives With Body On Roof After Accident
A woman who hit and killed a pedestrian drove for miles, seemingly unaware the victim’s body was dangling from the roof. Investigators believe the driver was under the influence when she struck the pedestrian.

Drunk Man Drives Into Restaurant
A drunk driver drove his car into a Denny's restaurant, injuring three women seated at a booth. He claimed that he hit the accelerator instead of the break.

Daniel Tammet can tell you the answer...without using a calculator! Just like Kim Peek - the man who inspired the movie Rain Man - Daniel Tammet is a savant and has the extraordinary ability to memorise large amounts of informaiton and perform mind-boggling calculations. Tammet uses a system of colours, textures and emotional resonance to memorise numbers.

"The number one is a brilliant and bright white, like somebody shining a torch beam into my eyes ... Four is shy and quiet, like me. Eighty-nine is like falling snow ..."

He holds the British and European record for reciting pi from memory to 22,514 decimal places. But, like most savants, life beyond memorising information can be very difficult. Until he was 8- or 9-years-old he didn't realise that other children had thoughts and feelings and still finds going to the supermarket a difficult experience. Here are some facts about Tammet.

# He can speak 10 languages, including Lithuanian and Welsh, as well as his own invented language, "Mänti", which has about 1,000 words.

# As part of a documentary that was made about him, called 'Brainman', Tammet learned Icelandic in a week, in front of the cameras. The culmination of the challenge was a live interview on Icelandic TV, which he coped with brilliantly.

A poll of 1,000 people has revealed 57- year-old men and women are the most content. When asked to rate how happy they were their lives, including friends, family and work, those in their late 50s rated themselves the highest — mainly because their families had flown the nest and they had more disposable income.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Most of the frogs are thought to be still in the north Pacific. This particular frog is thought to have broken away from the others early on and travelled 10,000 miles to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.

All this month there are events happening in Newport. Last night a concert was held on High Street featuring The Fabrics from Bristol. As you can see from the video, it wasn't as successful as it could have been.

"It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it."

This is based on statistics from sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia in which the vast majority of people consume the information on a site with just a tiny minority of people creating the content.

Anyone for a delicious bacon martini? If you want to make one of your own here are the instructions...

Perfect Bacon Martini
Lightly mist martini glass with vermouth, and rim the edge with bacon grease. In a cocktail shaker, mix 3oz vodka, one dash tobasco, and one dash olive juice. Shake well and strain into cocktail glass. Skim excess bacon grease from surface of cocktail. Garnish with one slice of bacon.

Barking Dog Cost Owners £1,000
Dog owners been fined £1,000 after their German Shepherd Dog continuously barked when left alone. They were fined after being issued four Noise Abatement Notice over a two year period.

The next time you call directory inquiries in Italy, you may speak to a convicted murderer. Telecom Italia have opened up a new call centre within a prison where 24 inmates spend the day giving out telephone numbers and addresses.

"This may seem like a boring routine job, but for people who would otherwise spend the day sitting in our cells and doing nothing, it actually gives a sense to your life," said 34-year old Salvatore Striano, who has been convicted for Mafia crimes and also works in the call-center.

The detainees get paid 12 cents ($0.15) per call answered and on a normal day each one of them deals with around 200 requests for information.

The prisoners cannot dial outside the jail and the company's computerized switchboard randomly directs each call to any one of Telecom's 45 call centers scattered across Italy.

A family in Manhattan have created a roof-top paradise after building a front porch and garden on top of their six storey apartment. They decided to build it after a visit to their friends house 8 years ago.

“We were sitting on the porch, the lake was only 20 feet away, and I said, ‘That’s what I want — I’d love to have a porch,’ ” said Mr. Puchkoff, who is in his mid-60’s.

The 1,200sq/ft garden contains thousands of plants in 7" of lighweight soil which doesn't strain the wiehgt-bearing capacity of the roof.

It's been a while since I gave an Ozum update so here's the skinny on what's been happening.

We are currently working on a project with the newly formed Welsh Six Sigma Network which is a Welsh Assembly funded project to help promote Six Sigma in businesses in Wales. This is a great project to be involved with as it involves the local university and local government.

The project includes creating a logo and dynamic website for the organisation. Not being graphic designers we had to contract out the logo design to a local design company. He came up with a great logo that both us and the client were pleased with.

The site itself is still being built and is being built using ASP.NET and will be compliant and accessible. Here's a screenshot of what the site currently looks like. The site is due to launch on September 1st.

We've also had some great feedback on a site we built for a local solicitors. They already had an existing site but was very poorly constructed. We rebuilt their site using the existing content and added some relevant stock photography. Since launching the new site they have noticed an increase in enquiries through their website and a businessman from the US who was looking to sell flats in Newport chose the company because their site looked better than others in the area.

That said, business is a little slow and we are meeting up with a marketing bod to help us get a marketing campaign set up. We can build websites and applications but we're useless when it comes to selling them.

Google Accessible Search, a new project from Google Labs, aims to make the search experience better for visually impaired users. The search results maintain their relevance like the normal Google search but Accessible Search further sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts.

In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully--that is, pages with few visual distractions, and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off.

Ironically, whilst the site favours accessible sites, the search engine itself is not accessible!

Philipp over at Google Blogoscoped has created a tool to compare the regular Google search with the new Accessible Search.

The Pirate Bay charges €20,000 per day for it's biggest ads and so far has sold 4 of them. On average it sells around €60,000 worth of ads per month. With revenues like that it's no wonder that the RIAA have been trying to shut them down. More.

A team of astronomers from the UK and Germany found a nuclear explosion on the surface of a star 5,000 light-years from Earth. It resulted in a blast wave moving at over 1,700 km per second (one thousand miles per second or almost four million miles per hour).

The discovery was made by bringing together many of the world's radio telescopes into arrays capable of seeing the aftermath of the explosion in incredible detail. The star was in an area of sky on 5 millionths of a degree – the size of a football seen from 2,700 km (1,700 miles) away.

The Magic Message Mirror was designed by the animatronics guru that produced the King Kong ride at Universal Studios Florida and contains Basil who will let you know what's happening in your house. The mirror is rigged up to camera and triggers in your house and when an alarm is triggered Basil awakes to alert you. The mirror is aimed at rappers with too much money and as such the pricing hasn't been disclosed. [via]